urbanSTL

http://nextstl.com/2015/02/city-target- ... at-cortex/

Awwww, shucky-ducky!

Really great to see this going forward in what really is a seriously underdeveloped corner. Things just keep looking brighter for the little innovation district that could.

Edit: It appears there is something afoot.

TechShop COO: We were doing backflips over chance to come to St. Louis


"When Cortex first approached us, we were just doing backflips over the opportunity of putting a TechShop (there)," he said. "We're super excited to be there. This is an innovation district that really combines incubators and accelerators, in a variety of disciplines ranging from medicine and bio-research to engineering and manufacturing, so it's a thrilling community to be part of and truly a world class innovation community."
Cortex will construct a new three-story, 60,000-square-foot-building at the corner of Boyle and Forest Park Avenues that will serve as TechShop St. Louis' new home, with TechShop occupying about 18,000 square feet on the building's first floor.



http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog ... l?page=all

So many backflips that they needed millions of dollars before committing.

I would do back flip or least make a feeble attempt to do a back flip if CORTEX would announce new square footage for a West Coast life science firm or a East Coast pharma commitment that would bring life science jobs from outside the area from to a life science center. CORTEX has done a great job to date but St. Louis needs a win that goes beyond recent retail announcements.

What has it promised?

^ I'll have to look up details, but a couple thousand jobs for the site. Wexford also pledged that if it got the Metrolink Station it would bump up density and pull back on parking.

edit.... here is more:

goat314 wrote:This TOD project has the potential to create over 600 construction jobs and house over 1,800 full time jobs when complete - but it will not be possible unless the new MetroLink station is constructed. Without the new station the project benefits will be sharply reduced because Wexford will need to significantly increase the allocation of parking and reduce the office and laboratory space.

I believe residential is also part of the new mix.

Learn about tech shop membership here

https://secure.techshop.ws/memberships. ... 4&offer=58

onecity wrote:I've heard that Boyle / FP Techshop building requires tenants to put up like 4 years of rent in advance, and commit to 8 years.

4 years of rent in advance is ridiculously steep. If that is the case, I imagine an extreme discount.

Was the Boyle MetroLink station part of the CORTEX master plan since its conception in the early 2000's, or is it just a convenient coincidence that the area they wanted to redevelop just so happened to be next to the tracks?

Gateway City--I thought you might like this background:

We started Technopolis (Cortex's former name) in the late 80's and the initial planning area was much larger than the 180 acres that now comprise the TIF district and 353 redevelopment area. We got our first big boost when we were able to lure what is now the CET in from where it was formerly located near Monsanto in the late 90's when we secured ownership of their first building. Long time SLDC employee and now deceased Pat Bannister played an important role in keeping things on track in the early years before we had a building as well as securing the Building 1. Marcia Mellitz, CET's first Ex. Dir. grew the center and secured development of Building 2.

By the late 90's I had the city rebuild the sidewalk and infrastructure on Sarah from Lindell to Forest Park with the hope of making it a similar commercial spine to that of Euclid but with hope that it might eventually stretch and connect to Manchester. I decided I wanted the Metro stop at Sarah as a way of linking the CWE to FPSE and serve as a stimulus of converting the older industrial to mixed use. I secured funding for the first study and hired John Roach in about 1999.

The CET had lost one of its star tenants to West Port and Marcia was concerned about not having break out space in the city near the medical centers for tenants that outgrew the incubator. We decided to hold off on pursuing the stop until we secured land acquisition funding, but we continued the planning. We wanted to own as much land as we could before we would secure the station. The goal was to have a public or benevolent group get the pop in value after the stop was secured.

I was able to raised another $250,000 to fund a more significant study by the Smith Group that we used as a marketing/sales piece to help us raise the acquisition funding. Since the city didn't have acquisition funds, Marcia and I spent several years calling on foundations and other funding sources.

By 2002 Bill Danforth had retired as Chancellor of WU and was looking for new challenges and had started the Danforth Plant Science center and the Coalition of Plant and Life Sciences. In March of that year he and Marcia were on the RCGA trip to Boston and Bill was impressed by what was going on around MIT. Marcia told him about our attempts to raise a land acquisition fund. When they got back Marcia set up a meeting for Bill, John Dubinsky (head of the real estate committee for the coalition), Don Rubin (Ex. Dir. of the coalition) and I to meet.

In the most extraordinary act of civic leadership I witnessed, three meetings and ninety days later, Bill and John had raised $29.5 Million for a site acquisition fund from what are now the five institutional partners of Cortex. John had recently retired and volunteered to lead the effort and he recruited Lewis Levey, who had sold his real estate holdings to a reit to help out and also contribute his time. John and Lewis worked almost full time for free for several years getting Cortex launched. It wasn't until 2005 that the 353 ordinance was passed that created the 180 acres Cortex West redevelopment area.

John rebranded the effort as Cortex from Technopolis, and immediately saw the potential of the Metro stop. We were able to acquire the Clayton and Sarah corners early, but the Duncan Sarah corners were cost prohibitive (the US Metals site subsequently became available but the grain elevator was and not owned by Cortex). John wanted to move the stop to Boyle--many thousands of dollars, several more studies, and countless setbacks later it is--at least for now going to be between Boyle and Sarah.

Roger--I never asked him but I don't think so. Although Wash U and Monsanto have a research relationship that goes back decades, and they have an overlapping interest in genomics and bioinformatics, by the late 90's Monsanto had already pledged the use of a building on their campus for the Nidus Center. Since Cortex has gotten established I don't spend as much time working with the start up community now as I did then, but at that time there were several different currents of activity. There was the incubators for the non tech businesses and then the tech sector which was kind of divided between the life science effort and everything else (but mostly communication and IT). Some questioned if we could get to critical mass with just one or two sectors, others felt that we could only get to critical mass with focus on one or two sectors. This was going on before I got involved which was in the late '80's. My personal feeling was things kind of ebbed and flowed with some progress but no clear leadership until Bill Danforth got active after he retired as Chancellor.

He put his effort and the assets of the Danforth Foundation behind the Plant and Life Science sector and recruited his friends and much of the regions philanthropic community to join him-- John Dubinsky led his facilities committee, John McDonnell led the VC committee etc. Soon there was a regional business plan and a punch list of to dos that were being addressed sequentially.

By the time we had the funds committed to the acquisition pool, there were two/three nodes targeted for Plant and Life Science. The Olive/Lindbergh intersection with Monsanto, and then Cortex West and South.

ward17 wrote:Gateway City--I thought you might like this background:

We started Technopolis (Cortex's former name) in the late 80's and the initial planning area was much larger than the 180 acres that now comprise the TIF district and 353 redevelopment area. We got our first big boost when we were able to lure what is now the CET in from where it was formerly located near Monsanto in the late 90's when we secured ownership of their first building. Long time SLDC employee and now deceased Pat Bannister played an important role in keeping things on track in the early years before we had a building as well as securing the Building 1. Marcia Mellitz, CET's first Ex. Dir. grew the center and secured development of Building 2.

By the late 90's I had the city rebuild the sidewalk and infrastructure on Sarah from Lindell to Forest Park with the hope of making it a similar commercial spine to that of Euclid but with hope that it might eventually stretch and connect to Manchester. I decided I wanted the Metro stop at Sarah as a way of linking the CWE to FPSE and serve as a stimulus of converting the older industrial to mixed use. I secured funding for the first study and hired John Roach in about 1999.

The CET had lost one of its star tenants to West Port and Marcia was concerned about not having break out space in the city near the medical centers for tenants that outgrew the incubator. We decided to hold off on pursuing the stop until we secured land acquisition funding, but we continued the planning. We wanted to own as much land as we could before we would secure the station. The goal was to have a public or benevolent group get the pop in value after the stop was secured.

I was able to raised another $250,000 to fund a more significant study by the Smith Group that we used as a marketing/sales piece to help us raise the acquisition funding. Since the city didn't have acquisition funds, Marcia and I spent several years calling on foundations and other funding sources.

By 2002 Bill Danforth had retired as Chancellor of WU and was looking for new challenges and had started the Danforth Plant Science center and the Coalition of Plant and Life Sciences. In March of that year he and Marcia were on the RCGA trip to Boston and Bill was impressed by what was going on around MIT. Marcia told him about our attempts to raise a land acquisition fund. When they got back Marcia set up a meeting for Bill, John Dubinsky (head of the real estate committee for the coalition), Don Rubin (Ex. Dir. of the coalition) and I to meet.

In the most extraordinary act of civic leadership I witnessed, three meetings and ninety days later, Bill and John had raised $29.5 Million for a site acquisition fund from what are now the five institutional partners of Cortex. John had recently retired and volunteered to lead the effort and he recruited Lewis Levey, who had sold his real estate holdings to a reit to help out and also contribute his time. John and Lewis worked almost full time for free for several years getting Cortex launched. It wasn't until 2005 that the 353 ordinance was passed that created the 180 acres Cortex West redevelopment area.

John rebranded the effort as Cortex from Technopolis, and immediately saw the potential of the Metro stop. We were able to acquire the Clayton and Sarah corners early, but the Duncan Sarah corners were cost prohibitive (the US Metals site subsequently became available but the grain elevator was and not owned by Cortex). John wanted to move the stop to Boyle--many thousands of dollars, several more studies, and countless setbacks later it is--at least for now going to be between Boyle and Sarah.

So is that a yes or a no? I mean, since MetroLink wasn't around yet in the '80s and all, I would guess it's a no. That's an interesting story. The reason I ask is that I am working on a mini-documentary that mentions the Boyle station.

Gateway City--The answer is yes or no depending on what you want to consider the start of Cortex. Prior to the CET relocating from near Monsanto to it's present location in about '95 Technopolis was mostly an ad hoc working group of maybe dozen or two people. After CET opened it gave us a place to meet and "kind of" became a home to those interested in the start up industry and in a way merged the interests of those of us who thought of it as an economic development tool or real estate play with those who were interested in it for the technology development potential. By the mid 90s Metro had been running for a few years and Technopolis was starting to get a little traction, but there was no planned stop.

I started working on the stop in the late 90's thinking it might be our region's first chance to do a TOD along the line and the center piece of our car optional strategy for our neighborhoods (FPSE and CWE), but it was much harder to get started than I thought. The operations people hated the idea of stopping the train and fought it. We went through three Ex. Dir. of Metro following the loss of the law suit on the Shrewsbury expansion, before John Nation took over and of course there was no money and not enough "steam" to change minds. From the time I started working on it until now the estimated cost of stopping the train went from $5 Million to over $10 Million.

After a year or two of working covertly on it and getting nowhere, we turned up the heat by paying for study that was used to create public support and "steam". Here is the link to $250,000 that engaged the public: https://www.stlouis-mo.gov/archive/midt ... -03-03.pdf It is the first "public" document that shows the stop and it was completed shortly before I met with Bill and John in 2002.

After that we raised the money for acquisition, Technopolis became Cortex and every map of Cortex from then on had a planned stop on it.

The study became the centerpiece of our car optional strategy and was used as our guide for many decisions for a number of years, and is now replaced with our form based codes. As an example Park Central Development was an outgrowth of that plan.

The stop wasn't planned when Technopolis was started but it was planned before Cortex was started.

Regarding your project, at one point several years ago one of the civic groups was trying to put together a documentary of how Bill and John raised the money with a focus on a memorable meeting with some great back stories. It was a come to papa meeting that was where everything came together. Let me know if you would like me to try to track it down or want information on the early years of planning of the stop. After we hired Dennis, I wasn't as involved as much on a day to day basis and he and several other Cortex board members really took the ball and ran with it and would better sources to talk to about the multiple sources of funding they pursued before they hit pay dirt.

^ I have visions in my head of a new Technopolis district nearby Cortex.... with its own Metrolink stop as well. Or maybe it is in Northside Regeneration and travel between the two is largely done by Jetson-mobiles or driverless cars. Or hyperloop.

I hope the trend continues.

Monsanto has moved a team to the Cortex Innovation Community
http://cortexstl.com/monsanto-joins-the ... community/